From Kansas City to Milan to New York City: A collection of adventures and lessons learned traveling and experiencing this world. From my experiences with Grad School, Coaching, and working for a Start Up and more. #Travel #AmericanAbroad #ContentMarketing

For my Master’s Project with Beast Technologies, I had the unique opportunity to develop, plan, and implement a Content Marketing Strategy from scratch that grew our Social Media presence almost 80% in 6 months across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I am going to try and keep it contained to the key points and small takeaways as I don’t believe that you can just put a blanket strategy for every market.

There are plenty of people, books, blogs (this one included) that talk about Content Marketing and the winning strategy. Want to know what they all have in common? CONSISTENCY! Whether it is B2B or B2C you have to show consistency and start differentiating yourself as a thought leader.

Consistency is key when developing and creating a strategy across content and socials. Yes SEO, Keyword Optimization, and Back-linking are what is really needed in order to drive the most traffic possible, you have to start somewhere and create a depot of content first.

But before you start producing content for the sake of content, there are 2 things you have to know; Who are my customers? So create ‘Customer Personas’ and how will my customers find this content/what are they searching for? Make sure you have you ‘Buyer Journey’ mapped out. Without these 2 things how can you have a ‘focused’ approach?

When I looked at Beast we had 3 things in place to build on: a strong brand (logo, signage, etc), the right tools (in house videographer and photoshop expert), and a strong Digital Marketing setup with having a fully optimized website. With those tools in place we were set to start building.

Beast Blog:

We had a blog that we tried to update monthly but there was no consistency or flows of the content. So we decided as a Strength and Conditioning company, to go after low hanging fruit to get new content and use it to start posting regularly. We did this by first curating content to get ideas about what experts in the industry were talking about. We also know that we needed to educate the industry on Velocity Based Training. Also creating a How-To Guide on using the product was a great way to get out a lot of content quick. Between myself and 2 others we were able to write and publish over 70 articles in 8 months providing us with a great depth of content. But what needed to happen over those 8 months was moving from easier articles to start delivering more thought provoking and authority on content which is where we have been heading and where we are going. This provided us with consistency in posting weekly.

Facebook/Twitter:

To get ideas for the blog we curated a lot of content from industry experts across the field. Through re sharing this curated content we were able to get an idea of what our community was interested in. This helped lead to further content creation and our goal to be an authority and thought leader. We started using Buffer as a our sharing tool to schedule out 10 days worth of content across the platforms to start showing consistency and our tone of voice.

Instagram:

Instagram has turned out to be our best form of communication and driving much more interaction than other platforms as the fitness and SC industry live here. The ability to post photos and short form videos that you can then share on Facebook and Twitter make Instagram a very useful tool for driving traffic and showing your product. We alsu used multiple hashtags that our users could use to drive conversation and talk about Beast.

With our product being able to show how to use it as well as seeing other customers using this product was instrumental in developing and driving our products usability and brand forward.

LinkedIn:

This is a channel we do not use as heavily or focus on other than making sure to post some good content. We also made sure to get all our Co-Founders and key managers updated on LinkedIn as people want to see that as a start-up we have key people in place who are active. We have been consistent in posts on our page and in key groups that have driven growth.

This was our starting founding outline. From here we put a calendar in place using co-schedules best times to post. As we are a global brand that drives our customers to our eCommerce it was imperative to get a strong content plan in place to match up with our digital marketing advertising. The 2 in partnership have helped drive increased traffic and sales month over month in 2016 and we are set up to become even more of a thought leader in 2017.

Granted this is a brief outline of what we did, the basic key when starting up a new company, keep it simple. Before you can be 1st page Google, SEO’d, Keyword Optimized, and back linked you need to first get content created and out there. First you need to be found and then build on that and as you grow make sure you can scale. Start connecting with blogs, influencers, etc to get you message out there and start linking to your website.

It is important to get connected, linked, and talked about as quickly as possible but you must have the time and scalability. Creating content takes time and effort to make sure you are really providing good content to your community.

Key takeaways:

Consistency

Keep it simple

Set up for scalability

Become the Authority and a Thought Leader

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RobbyNap

Robert is just a Midwest boy form Kansas City, Missouri and on a mission to ‘take over the world’ (in my best Brain voice)! Graduated in 2016 with a Master’s Degree from MIP Graduate School of Business at Politecnico di Milano in you guessed it.. Milan, Italy. Currently work as a Senior Consultant, Digital Marketing Team Lead at Michael Page USA. Formerly worked for 2 years in a startup as the Head of Content and Global for the Italian based start up Beast Technologies. Experienced in fundraising, pitching, and growth strategies as well as went through a 3 month startup accelerator. Former Assistant Coach for the 2 time IFL Champion Milano Seamen American Football Team. I am passionate about life and figuring out what it means to be globally connected. I have a passion for Content, Branding, Digital Strategy, and Marketing across cultures! I am a lover of coffee, travel, and whiskey and living my own adventure!

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